


Guided by Her Science

by Mondax



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25086298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mondax/pseuds/Mondax
Summary: A short, unbeta-ed product of automatic writing that attempts to be a canon-ish look of what’s inside Cosima’s mind after she had her eureka moment in Season 4.
Relationships: Delphine Cormier/Cosima Niehaus
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	Guided by Her Science

The rays of the sun slip through the narrow basement windows, unexpectedly bathing the underground lab in a different light this morning. A light that faintly looks like hope. A light that, for the first time since that last kiss outside Bubbles, feels like a fighting chance against the odds and dangers. Cosima sits on a stairstep and lets out a deep breath before standing up. She wanted to bask in the unusual light but there is still work to be done, bags to be packed. 

_“What if we create a blastocyst?”_

Cosima was spitballing ideas with Susan when the solution to getting a perfect original genetic line beyond drawing samples from Kendall hit her - merge the two parts of Kendall’s unique biology by fertilizing a Leda egg: Sarah’s, with Castor sperm: Ira’s. For a moment after her eureka moment, she forgot where she was and who she was talking to, suddenly finding herself transported back to another space and time.

_“We’re molecular encoding from 30 years ago.”_

_“Yes, but we’re looking at it from now.”_

“ _They weren’t coding nucleotides..._ ”

“ _It was whole base pairs?_ ”

“ _Not four letters, but two - AT and GC._ ”

“ _Ones and zeroes._ ” 

The memory was so powerful that it made Cosima look to her right, expecting another figure hunched on a microscope or writing notes, her face partially hidden by a cascade of blonde hair. She imagined her reaction - of wide hazel eyes, of small perfect lips slightly agape, of a relieved laugh, of a hug, of kisses all over her face. 

“She would have been proud of you,” Scott said when the call with Susan ended, fully aware of what’s in her mind. 

“I wish she’s here...” Cosima whispered, “so we could figure things out together.” Delphine may be alive but not knowing where she could be was a different kettle of fish altogether.

Scott rubbed his nape and walked towards Cosima’s desk, opening a drawer. “She led us here,” and Scott grabbed Delphine’s journal. “She may have stepped out of the lab but she never let it go - the research for the cure. And wherever she is now, something tells me she’s still holding on...”

It was him who found Delphine’s journal when he came back to their old Dyad lab the day after the dinner at Bubbles. It was hidden in plain sight inside a box of his personal belongings beneath some books and the Agricola board game. Cosima knew something wasn’t right when Delphine showed up that night and didn’t enter the soap shop, opting instead to talk by the door about keeping Kendall Malone safe and far away. The motions and emotions of the tear-tinged kiss felt like a second chance at first, but when Cosima was left alone on the sidewalk as Delphine drove off, the kiss began to feel like a goodbye. 

She called her repeatedly that night, rehearsing in between rings what she would say when Delphine picks up - something along the lines of coming over to talk about what to do now that Kendall is in the picture, choosing to stick to the crazy science and hoping that something re-blossoms between them in the midst of it.

But Cosima never got to say her crazy science speech. The blonde’s phone just rang and rang. 

She left a voicemail in her last attempt before going to sleep on Scott’s couch. He took her in while they looked for their new base of operations. And as she tossed and turned in worry, Cosima tried to let the rational, practical part of her mind reason with her. Delphine was just in transit - probably on a long-haul flight to Europe to tend to Dyad or Topside matters that she kept secret from her. In the morning she would get a hold of her and she would joke about how worried she was the night before.

But by late morning, Delphine’s phone was unreachable. Whether it was disconnected or shut off, Cosima didn’t know, which only escalated her worries. With Sarah and Mrs. S off to Iceland, she had nobody to call for her help but Art. “Her car is in the Dyad parkade,” he said an hour later. She made a mad dash to Dyad, catching her breath every few steps, only to be stopped by guards stationed by the parking entrance. “You don’t work here anymore,” one said, “we can’t let you through.” She went back to Scott’s after Art promised that he’d look and ask around for her. 

When she returned, Scott regarded her with a worried, concerned look - the look of someone who wanted to express his deepest sympathies over a loss. It really hit her that something bad had happened to Delphine when she saw the note posted in the journal’s leather cover: _Pour ma Eskimo Pie_. 

With her clothes haphazardly packed in her suitcase, Cosima carefully stows what remains of their research desecrated by Evie Cho’s tainted intentions and ambitions. She takes a gander at the lab notes, the failed viral vectors engineered with limited resources that impressed Susan. She can’t help but let her mind linger on a big _what-if_ : how things might have gone differently if a brilliant immunologist - one who’s invested in the science as much as she is, was involved in every step of the way. Her attention shifts from the notes to the journal, opening to particular pages while avoiding the very last entry. 

_“You’ve used both retro and adenoviruses...”_

One of the unexpected things Cosima loves about Delphine is her penmanship. Be it in script or in print, she has beautiful handwriting reminiscent of the architect’s daughter font. She relished reading the lab notes they wrote together in their days at their Dyad lab only for her to see it and run a hand over it.

Cosima realized early on though that there’s another side to Delphine’s handwriting, that the elegant penmanship becomes hurried and barely legible when she’s writing out of excitement, out of passion. How the years of stringent boarding school calligraphy lessons went out the window in every sentence of the letters she wrote to her - letters written after misunderstandings and shouting matches; letters written by her bedside as she watched over her while she’s hooked to a cannula; letters conveying a shared future, of plans to visit Paris and San Francisco; and letters filled with affection and love, of describing memories of nights spent moaning and whispering sweet nothings to each other’s bare skins, of the sweet quiet moments of a life shared together, regardless of how short and temporary it was.

The writings in the journal are a mix of neatly written letters and scrawled sentences, with a huge chunk of Delphine’s journal notes before the last entry devoted to gene therapies and choosing the right vector to ensure its success. The notes on retro and adenoviruses were extensively researched - something that surprised Cosima the first time she read it. When she broke up with her, she was convinced that Delphine did it in her quest for ultimate corporate power. She didn’t expect her to even cast a glance at a scholarly gene therapy article, expecting her to devote all her time and attention to climbing Dyad and Topside’s treacherous corporate ladders. 

Yet Delphine’s scrawls about weighing the pros and cons of viral vectors and their possible side effects conveyed devotion, commitment. She could only imagine Delphine writing them after work, perhaps with a glass of wine or two, surrounded by mountains of research, her laptop probably littered with opened tabs and documents. 

It choked Cosima up when she remembered what - _who -_ she was doing on nights when Delphine compiled these notes. 

So she and Scott threw their very best work in bringing Delphine’s research into life once the lab under the comic book shop was ready. Every promising viral vector was filled with hope, hope that it works so she could get better enough to actually spearhead the search for Delphine. Cosima knew that all of Clone Club was looking for her and while she appreciated their efforts, she knew she was the only one who could devote everything she had in searching for her. Their efforts couldn’t and wouldn’t match hers, if only she didn’t cough up blood every few minutes. 

But every failed trial dashed the reserves of hope Cosima had left. Apart from her seemingly impending mortality, every test that showed a vector’s failure was like another stab at Delphine’s work, at her sacrifice. On the night of Kendall’s murder when Evie said that Delphine was shot dead, those minimal taps of hope were incinerated along with Kendall’s dead body. And when it turned out that there was nothing left to search for but a grave, her own death had suddenly become an appealing option. So while all the viral vectors engineered in the basement lab were borne out of Delphine’s promised devotion to her and her sestras, the crazy idea of implanting Sarah’s bot in her own cheek was borne out of Cosima’s despair and desperation. 

She was this close to putting it in until Scott banged on the door, pleading for her to answer Felix’s call.

“ _Delphine was still alive when they took her away..._ ” 

It was all it took for Cosima’s reserves of hope to be brought back to life, to be filled just enough for her to take a step back and look into the science to figure out what she’s missing.

Cosima puts the lab notes back in the desk drawer before carefully placing Delphine’s journal inside her bag. She isn’t the type to keep a diary, but in the nights that were too quiet, she wrote instead of reading Delphine’s words - words that were meant to explain, words that were meant to say goodbye. She wrote about calculating the genetic payload in one Adenovirus vector. She wrote about the possible mutations in a lot of their Retrovirus trials. She wrote about the biophysical approaches to gene therapy, using it as a long-winded introduction to her bot incident. Just this morning she wrote about sleeping in Felix's loft last night for the purposes of plausible deniability since Mrs. S needed the Rabbit Hole for something serious.

_“This will likely be my last entry. I do not expect to live out the night.”_

Cosima can’t get herself to read past the first sentence of Delphine’s last note, so she writes because she couldn’t accept the empty pages that followed it. She couldn’t accept that Delphine’s life is finished, that they are finished. 

“ _I’m about to go to the island which means I could never come back,_ ” Cosima writes as the helicopter prepares to fly out. “ _I don’t know where you are, Delphine, but at least I know you’re still alive...which has given me hope. Everything I did after that night by Bubbles is for the role you asked me to play - the role to cure.”_

“We’re ready,” the pilot said, and as Cosima secured the organ transplant box containing her last shot at a cure, she wrote her last words before traversing through the unknown.

  
_“Please guide me with your science so I can find you and try to make things right._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This is my first one-shot and my first canon-ish work. Please let me know what you think of it. :)


End file.
